I Sold Emotional Labor and Here’s What I Learned

I am an angry feminist. I know. Shocker. I’m sure you all dropped whatever you were holding and it was probably heavy and it landed on your foot and then broke so now you have a broken foot and a broken whatever-you-were-holding and it’s sad all the way around. But at any rate I’m glad you heard it from me and not some other source.

So a couple of months ago I started selling emotional labor? Why? Well as a feminist and a woman who has met…men, it’s been my job for a while. Since my days of yore including with my emotionally unwell father on up, I’ve been holding the hands of strangers, church members, and drunk men at parties for a long time. I have a PhD in cleaning emotional sputum off of whatever outfit I have on. Emotional labor has been a bit of a hot button topic in the news lately because women are invoicing it as labor. We’re defining it as the work that it is. In the dismantling of traditional gender roles, men are now being held accountable for all the invisible hours women work to sustain the people in their lives. In the spirit of that notion, I started advertising on craigslist, and on fiverr, and in a couple facebook groups.”